German Patent Application No. DE 3 145 381 A1 discloses a transmission-engine arrangement for fuel-saving purposes wherein a single combustion engine is subdivided into two or more autonomous partial combustion engines by subdividing the crankshaft into two or more crankshaft portions that can be activated and connected as a function of the desired torque.
On the one hand, subdividing a combustion engine into two small combustion engines results in an optimized dimensioning of the individual combustion engines and a corresponding reduction of fuel consumption. Yet on the other hand, such a subdivided drive unit requires more installation space. However especially in applications that include longitudinally-mounted front engines, there is only a limited amount of installation space in the longitudinal direction of the vehicle, among other reasons because the vehicle may become very front-heavy, i.e. its center of gravity may shift too far towards the front side of the vehicle.